Folks, it happened. The Milwaukee Bucks have agreed to re-sign free agent guard Gary Trent Jr. to a four-year, $64m deal, per ESPN insider Shams Charania.
According to Charania, “The Bucks and Trent’s reps worked through negotiations since the NBA Finals ended in mid-June while also sorting through sign-and-trade possibilities from interested teams over the last week. The sides moved toward completing a new deal together Saturday.”
The news shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. While reporting broke
of Trent declining his player option in late June, rumour widely spread that Trent would return to the Bucks on the back end of handshake deal that kept him in Milwaukee on a team-friendly contract last season. Needless to say, Bucks fans weren’t particularly enamoured with the idea of giving him one more chance.
This is obviously just “the price of doing business” with Klutch Sports. Though we will never know for sure, it certainly seems this was predetermined after Trent re-signed on another small contract following the 2024-25 season (and a terrific playoff run), presumably to gain Bird rights with the team. The issue was that his 2024-25 performance was clearly an outlier, as he averaged his second-lowest PPG last season since his second year in 2025-26.
Yup, this is a bad contract the moment the ink is dry. Sigh.
